Hello, I will be travelling to North Sulawesi next week to start working as diving instructor/guide and am interested to meet some collegues on this forum! So please if you are one and willing to share some Sulawesi diving experience, please feel free, also vroonieusyahoo.com

Hi, i am not an instructor like you, but i am divemaster. In the last few years i dived about 100 times in the Bunaken area. It's a great place for diving. Have you dived there before? And for which place are you going to work?
I am a little bit jealous of you. I would really like to work in Manado/Bunaken in the diving industry and stay there. I am planning to do so next year.
Good luck and enjoy your time!

Lion Air flies from Jakarta to Manado every night.... it's absolutely worth going there! I met many expats from Jakarta in Bunaken, they come to there to dive for a long weekend.
You will like the island atmosphere there. People are extremely friendly, always singing and smiling. It's nothing like Bali.

Yes, I feel very lucky. Used to live/surf in Bali in '97 and allways wanted to return to Indonesia and now it is finally happening Never dived Menado before, just left the south Egyptian desert, where the diving is excelent but life is non existent, so realy look forward to this UPGRADE of life
www.minahasalagoon.com

I should think twice to stay there for a long term because of serious treat of mercury pollution, the entire sea in Indonesia belongs to the world's biggest trash dump. Read the following.

Bunaken: Floating garbage and the threat of mercury pollution

Bunaken National Park is one of six marine national parks in Indonesia. Designated in 1991, it covers 900 km2 of diverse reefs and some of the largest mangrove stands in the northern hemisphere. With the capital city of North Sulawesi province, Manado, located just 10 kilometers from the park by boat, one might conclude that the main water-quality concern for the park would be urban runoff, namely human waste. In fact, it is not.

"Two major rivers empty into Manado Bay in the vicinity of Manado, and these two rivers are heavily polluted," said Mark Erdmann, marine protected areas advisor for the park. The rivers contain raw sewage, among other materials. "However, Manado Bay drops off quite steeply to 300-500 meters, and the maximum depth between Bunaken Island and Manado is 800-900 meters. Between the depth and the strong currents that flush the bay, the result seems to be that most particulate matter never makes it to Bunaken."

Nonetheless, any material that floats -- i.e., plastic garbage, including bags and food packaging -- travels straight to the park. This is the principal water-quality problem the park currently faces. "The floating plastic garbage is a major eyesore for tourists," said Erdmann, adding that at times there appear to be more bits of plastic garbage in the water than fish. "Moreover, the shape of Bunaken Island is more or less a crescent, and floating plastic is often entrained in the bay, ending up on the main tourist beach." On the ecological side, the area is a major cetacean thoroughfare and at least three species of sea turtle are common, so the potential for plastic ingestion is real, though not witnessed so far.

The park is working to reduce the flow of plastics. "Stopping the major source of plastic garbage from Manado is the obvious long-term goal, and park management and the tourism community have made this abundantly clear to the local government," said Erdmann. "But this effort is majorly hampered because Manado's dump has been technically 'full' for three years, and the government has been unable to find an acceptable new site." He says the World Bank and the US Agency for International Development have expressed interest in helping Manado manage its waste problem, but these efforts are very preliminary. In the meantime, the park's multistakeholder Management Advisory Board has made local management of plastic garbage a priority for the board's second year of operation, and has begun a program of weekly beach cleanups funded by the park entrance fee. Dive operators have taken the step of reducing their use of disposable plastics, and have financed a video aimed at locals and tourists to encourage an end to plastic dumping.

Another potential problem for Bunaken has been that of petroleum hydrocarbon damage to some reefs. The vast majority of dive boats visiting the islands use relatively inefficient, two-stroke outboard engines that expel a certain amount of unused fuel oil into surface waters. There has been noticeable damage -- including disease, bleaching, and partial death -- to the shallow coral colonies that many divers come to see, and park managers suspect this could be a result of damage from fuel oil. "The local dive association has made a verbal commitment to begin switching the fleet over to cleaner-burning four-stroke engines as soon as they become available for sale in Indonesia, hopefully in the next year," said Erdmann.

What may pose the greatest future threat to the park, he says, is mercury contamination from illegal gold-mining in the mountainous watershed that drains to Manado Bay. The mining -- a widespread practice -- uses a mercury-based extraction process. The mercury enters the watershed and flows downstream. Aquatic organisms in the watershed and some marine animals in the estuarine zone are now showing elevated levels of mercury in their tissues. Corals and fish from Bunaken have tested contaminated with mercury and arsenic, and other heavy metals
Erdmann says it would be misleading to portray the park management as having its water-quality problems under control.

Much what you have said I also experienced, like all sorts of plastics in the sea but I think many ' westerners' could take responsibilities themselves too; are you going on holiday just for the fun of it, or at least you could try to convince people in INDOnesia about their responsibit(y)ies in their environment, the method is simple because there is also a financial element involved.
If there is more garbage in the sea and other places, then more foreign tourists are not willingly to come to INDOnesia ....... people in Europe and U.S.A (especially the state of California [???]) are more aware/educated about their own reposibilities in environmental pollution issues, as induviduals/human beings, etc.

The problem is that there are no goverment programs to make the people aware of the importance of a clean and
healthy environment, and i think there are too few tourists to blame these group for the pollution in Indonesia, the government
is extremely short term thinking, like most Indonesians, just try to make some quick cash. Environmental issues effect every life on this planet from the smallest
parasite to the human race. The reason for this is simple. A single disruption in the Earth?s delicate balance can mean certain
destruction of the very place that cradles the lives of many species. What is not so simple is finding alternatives to the now
dangerous and confronting acts of planet degradation that have been afflicted on the planet over recent years. One such issue
that requires consideration is deforestation. Trees have been or are being cut down at increasingly high rates. If this is not
stopped many unfavorable side effects could result.
Today 500,000 hectors vanish in a single week. There is no one easy answer
as there are many causes at the root of deforestation. One is overpopulation in cities and developing countries. Population is
continually growing in the third world like Indonesia. Some had land until increases in population forced them off it and they
became landless peasants that are forced to look for land in the untouched forests. This movement to the forests is in some ways
a result of government pressures. In place of implementing programs to help the poor these governments concentrate on the
cheapest, easiest, way to keep poverty out of sight and give the poor no other choice but to force other species out and
themselves in. The poor are pushed in further and further and destroy more every time they must move on.
What the poor do in the forests is the most devastating. In attempts to settle farmland, the poor become "shifted cultivators" and
resort to using slash and burn methods of tree removal. Slashing and burning involves what its name implies, trees are cut down
and the remains are burned. The ash is used as a fertilizer and the land is then used for farming or cattle grazing, however, the
soil that is cleared in slash and burn is left infertile, the nutrients in the soil are quickly absorbed by surrounding organisms
The farmers must move on sometimes to other areas and repeat this process and worthy land and trees become scarce. For farmers in
places like Indonesia, slash and burn methods are the only way to effectively clear land of parasites and unwanted
organisms; chemical means contaminate water and soil and farmers continue to turn to slashing and burning. It has become such
a dilemma. Flooding is a quite serious consequence of deforestation. Clearing the forest dramatically increases the surface run-off
from rainfall, mainly because a greater proportion of the rain reaches the ground due to a lack of vegetation which would suck up
the excess rainfall. "Tropical forests can receive as much rain in an hour as London would expect in a wet month.
Besides this obvious damage, we have large scale chemical and heavy metals contamination in Indonesia and today most rivers,
seas and oceans are used as a trash dump for these agents, at many places the color of the seas turn from dark brown to green or
yellow and with such a terrible smell that i even wouldn't allow my dog swimming there, but In Bali unaware parents let ther young
children swim there and then they start getting ear and eye infections and going to a comlete useless Indonesian dokter who is
just trying to earn some money and tell the parents there is nothing to weary about here, this is Bali, the paradise, just some
antibiotics and it will be fine, but i think it was just the beginning and the worst is yet to come for that child. Indonesia is dying.............

hi, i have been diving in Bunaken, and its still a great destination. The plastic and so on is a general problem all over Indonesia. So far I spend app6 years diving in Karimun Java National Park, at the problem also occyr there. I am a MSDT, www.bluenail-diveschool.com is my operation, located in Semarang central java

My info was not sucessful, I've noticed, but anyway you still need to contact Erwin Kodiat this guy has superb pictures of 'underwater wild-life' I think he could link you with other divers inside INDOnesia ...... try erwinterong.com
And: www.terong.com